Harvard serial entrepreneur pioneers 'big data' storage on DNA

The next company from Harvard genomics pioneer and serial entrepreneur George Church may involve commercializing a mind-bending type of "big data" storage — on DNA molecules.

A team at Harvard including Church has completed an experiment which encoded a book into DNA, and then read the book's text. The team published the results in Science on Thursday.

In the Wall Street Journal today, Church offers this quote on the ultimate potential of the technique: "A device the size of your thumb could store as much information as the whole Internet."

Church, who helped initiate the Human Genome Project and is a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School, has helped to found a dozen companies based on his work in genomics, including Joule, LS9, Knome, Gen9, Pathogenica and Warp Drive.

There's no indication Church plans to imminently launch a company around DNA data storage, he told the Wall Street Journal that the dropping cost of synthesizing and sequencing DNA could make the technique practical in the near future.

For the experiment, the Harvard team took a forthcoming book by Church ("Regenesis") and created nearly 55,000 strands of DNA to store the text, each containing a section of the text and an indicator of where the text belongs in the sequence of the book. The data was stored sequentially, as it would be on magnetic tape.

"For some archival problems, this could be the wave of the future," Church told the Wall Street Journal.